History Professor used to be lighter than air

By David Schmidt
Special to Main Line Life

When you meet Dr. Arthur Dudden, former chair of Bryn
Mawr College's history department you see a man whose
friendly demeanor probably made him a hit with his
students, breathing life into his history courses.

Look a bit deeper into his past and you find a Fulbright
Scholar who authored or edited
15 books and countless articles, who could be found
in at least four different "Who's Who"
books, who has a signed and inscribed photo of President
Ford and a cartoon of himself by famed political cartoonist
Oliphant. These honors came from his recognition as
an expert on American history and the history of political
humor.

Today, retired after 42 years at Bryn Mawr he is busy
preparing a second edition of a book on American influence
in the Pacific region. "It's about time I did
this book still has the Soviet Union in it,"
he says.

But dig down one more layer and you find a man who used
to fly at 50 feet over the Straits of Gibraltar in
the pitch black of night looking for German submarines
trying to run through the straits. That's because
this distinguished scholar spent WWII as a crewmember
on Navy blimps.

"I was born in Cleveland and raised in Detroit.
Having turned 20, I enlisted in the Navy in Sept. 1942"
he says. "I became an Aviation Machinists' Mate
and was assigned to a lighter-than-air squadron. I
ended up as an Aviation Machinists' Mate First class."

Blimps, as they were called by the people who crewed
them, were used for patrolling, anti-submarine warfare
and escorting convoys and ships. They differed from
the earlier dirigibles that had been used to bomb London
in WWI and then as luxurious passenger vessels plying
the Atlantic between the war.

These were rigid-framed airships, constructed of aluminum
and sent aloft by bags of hydrogen. Unfortunately,
hydrogen is extraordinarily explosive, and the world-famous
images of the German dirigible von Hindenburg exploding
at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey pretty much
stifled enthusiasm for commercial passenger service.

But blimps were different. Their shape was created
by gas, there was no solid structure above the crew
car. Within the bag there were two airbags, one in
front and one at the rear which gave the blimp its
shape and also were used to angle the nose down or
up by pumping air in and out of the two bags.

In between were the means of being lighter than air,
bags of helium.
Helium's biggest advantage is that it's safe it won't
explode. Before and during the war there was another
advantage, the U.S. had a virtual monopoly on commercial
volumes of the gas. Recognizing its strategic as well
as propagandistic value, American refused to sell it
to the Germans, forcing them to continue using the
deadly hydrogen.

So the navy created lighter-than-air squadrons and fitted
them out with blimps. Dudden flew on a ZNP-K, which
in English instead of Navy jargon mean it was a lighter
than air (Z), non rigid (N), patrol (P) model K airship.
Everybody called them King ships, because in the phonetic
alphabet used for radio transmissions at the time
"king" was used for "k."

The king ships stretched nearly a city block long when
inflated and the three production King models sizes
were 416,000, 425,000 and 456,000 cubic feet of volume.
Deflated the bag would fit in a shipping box 12 feet
by six feet by six feet although it weighted five
tons.

When inflated, the problem was staying on top of the
constant expansion and contraction fo the air and helium
in the bags. Every change of temperature, barometric
pressure or altitude changed the equation of how much
the helium bags lifted. So gas was constantly being
pumped in and out of the air bags, because helium was
a strategic material, rare and expensive. "It
would have been a pilot's career to vent a lot of helium
unless it was a catastrophic emergency," Dudden
says.

For Dudden, his work environment was the 42-ft.-long
car. It was built like a race car, with chrome-steel
tubing creating the frame and then covered with light-weight
aluminum panels. Inside the nine-ft.-wide and 14-ft.-high
car were crew stations, chairs and cots for off-duty
or additional crew, a wash basin and toilet and a single
parachute.

This wasn't a first-come, first-served safety device,
it was so if necessary one man could parachute to the
ground to become an emergency landing party. The crew
didn't wear parachutes because airships crashed rather
gently compared to an aircraft and often flew as such
a low altitudes that the parachutes would have been
more dangerous. There was a life raft, and each man
wore a life vest when flying over water.

Dudden was the senior of two machinists in the crew
and sate on the port side of the car. His station
included the throttle, fuel mixture controls as well
as instruments to monitor the engine's performance.
"Often when we were flying a long mission others
would help out with flying the airship. There were
two pilots, the co-pilot controlling the course and
heading movement sat on the right and the pilot on
the left controlled the altitude. In front of them
was a plexiglass panels allowing them a 180-degree
view, as well as the ability to see directly underneath
them essential for landing. Controlling the altitude
was very difficult, but we could handle turning the
airship," he says.

Dudden began his lighter-than-air career after completing
basic training in the fall of 1942. He was assigned
to South Weymouth, Mass. In the Z(lighter-than-air)P(patrol)-11
squadron. "Our mission was to fly patrols and
escort convoys," he says. "We often went
as far as Nova Scotia with them, or went out to meet
one coming west."

German submarines would lie in wait for the convoys.
Early in the war they hunted in packs, and sunk scores
of ship in each convoy. This was the Battle of the
Atlantic, and if the convoys didn't supply England
the Allies would be starved into submission. "You
never know what you'd see when the sun came up. Once
we saw a battered British aircraft carrier that didn't
look like it could possibly operate, but it was,"
he says.

There was a personal note to aircraft carriers, as well.
The Intrepid, now a floating museum in New York City
was built in the Boston yards, and they were assigned
to escort it during sea trials a hazardous time with
a new ship, new crew. "My brother-in-law was
assigned to the Intrepid after being on the Nevada
during the attack on Pearl Harbor. So he was on the
ship as it steamed up and down the coast for its sea
trials, and I was overhead, making sure nobody sunk
it," he says. Being sunk once is enough for
any sailor.

In another one of those fateful meeting, his crew was
sent out to escort the Queen Mary, which was sailing
alone, depending on its speed for safety. "We
were flying into quite a headwind, and since a blimp
only makes about 60 kts., rather than escorting her
we were desperately trying to keep up with her. It
became quite a race," he says.

In 1959 he sailed on the Queen Mary on his way to a
year in Denmark on a Fulbright Scholarship. "My
daughter was about eight at the time and I remember
playing shuffleboard," he says. "Years
later we visited the Queen Mary in San Diego and it
was eerie seeing that faded paint of that old shuffleboard
court still on the deck," he says.

In February, 1945 his crew transferred to ZP-14 in Port
Lyautey in Morocco after they had two blimps put out
of action by accidents. After flying across the Atlantic
they became the junior crew in a unit that had been
in Africa for more than a year. The most important
mission was patrolling the Straits of Gibraltar each
night.

Aircraft patrolled during the day, but the blimps, traveling
slower were more effective in using their radar and
the magnetic instruments that would locate a submarine
under water. "I was very, very lucky. To my
knowledge no one every fired at me, and we never had
to drop our bombs. I'm happy about that," he
says. "After the war they discovered that
there was a 900-ft.-deep trench and that may have been
how the Germans were getting in and out of the Strait,"
he says.

But it wasn't all fun and games. "We would fly
in the pitch black night and the instruments weren't
all that accurate. Of particular importance was the
altimeter. We would try to fly at 100 ft. but it
was easy to be off. One night in the fog we discovered
a ship right in front of us and we were at about 50
ft. The pilot literally stood the blimp on its tail
clawing for air," he says. "We made
it, but it sure got our attention."

But they were still the new guys. "We weren't
really appreciated, having just come from the states.
The others thought of themselves as the best of the
crews, since they were in the combat theater,"
he says. "We got a lot of the dirt details
for instance we were the ones out flying on VE day
(when the war ended in Europe) while everyone else
was celebrating," he says.

Although the war was over, their missions weren't.
Although the squadron was located in Morocco, there
were detachments all around the Mediterranean. "We
were tasked to go to Venice and help with minesweeping,"
he says. "There were still thousands and thousands
of mines out there. We worked with a group of minesweepers
and patrol boats, locating the mines and charting them.
Then the minesweepers, which had wooden hulls so they
wouldn't set them off, would cut the mine from the
line that held it in place. Then the patrol boats
would sink it with gunfire," he says.

"One time, a French patrol boat hit a mine and
exploded. We turned back over the wreck and saw crew
in the water. We shoved our inflatable life raft in
the water to them, but one guy who evidently didn't
know what he was doing used a knife to cut the covering
away and made a hole in it, and it sunk too,"
he says. "We flew overtop of the survivors as
low as we could and threw our own life jackets to each
of them. The another boat very carefully worked their
way to them through the minefield and picked them up,"
he says.

He also got the chance to go to Pisa, and still have
a picture of himself "holding" it up,
a popular tourist photo even today. Then the crew
went to Southern France, to the French airbase at Cuers-Pierrefeu.
A short time before it has been a base for German
dive bombers, and British Spitfires were already there
when the unit arrived. But this had been the major
lighter-than-air base for the French before the war.
"There were two huge dirigible hangars that
had been built in German for the Zeppelins,"
he says. "The French took them as war repatriations
and rebuilt them on this base."

After only a couple of months there, he got the message
every American serviceman in Europe was waiting for
orders home. "I had a wife and child, and
with my overseas time my number came up. I got a ride
back to Morocco and then the waiting started,"
he says. It wasn't enough to have orders, there had
to be transport.

Dudden waited three weeks, but finally got out of Casablanca
on a "Liberty" ship. He arrived at Brooklyn
Pier the day before Thanksgiving. "They told
us to come back on Friday, and I was lucky because
I had an aunt in New York and was able to have Thanksgiving
dinner with her," he says. The it was on to
Lido Beach Long Island and he was processed out of
the Navy.

He returned to Detroit and began working for Ford Motor
Company. "After about six months I figured
I better use my GI Bill and get an education,"
he says. He went to the Wayne State University for
his undergraduate degree and then earned both a master's
degree and doctorate at the University of Michigan.
He was then hired as a history professor at Bryn Mawr
College by department head Helen Taft Manning, daughter
of President Taft. "She said she hired me because
she wanted someone from the west in the department.
I guess at that time Michigan was west enough,"
he says.

Like any good historian, he can be both observer and
participant in history. After interviewing him for
most of an afternoon he thanked me: "you brought
a lot of things back to me that happened 55 years ago,"
he says. My guess is no matter how meaningful this
was to be, it was more so to him.

He looked back at a young sailor who had an adventurous
time defending his nation as a part of a rare group
whose rank ended with "QLTA." That means,
in Navy speak, "qualified lighter than air."